Alcoholism: The Cause & The Cure, The Biochemical Solution

Genita Petralli is a licensed, board certified H.H.P., N.C., and M.H. She is the author of Alcoholism: The Cause & The Cure and the Founder of AAAA (Alternative Approaches to end Alcohol Abuse) and Program Director of the 101 Program and the Ark bio-repair clinic in Santa Cruz, CA. She spent 10 years researching what changes occurred in the brain chemistry of long-term recreational drinkers that led to alcoholism as well as the epigenetic influences that inspired alcohol and other addictions. With her nutritional sciences, neurochemistry, and biochemistry background she then developed a supremely effective diet and therapeutic nutritional protocol known as The 101 Program to reverse the damage that her research exposed, address the epigenetic markers of the root cause, and cure the addiction.

Alcoholism: The Cause & The Cure is endorsed by highly esteemed doctors such as the famous Dr. Abram Hoffer M.D. (who also wrote the foreword), Joan Mathews-Larson Ph.D (Seven Weeks to Sobriety), Dr. Joe Dispenza (What the Bleep Do We Know? & Evolve Your Brain) and Andrew Saul Ph.D, author of Doctor Yourself and Fire Your Doctor. He is also Assistant Editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service.

Welcome to the most advanced withdrawal, detox and repair program in the field of holistically healing the body and mind from the damage excessive alcohol use inflicts thereby curing the addiction to alcohol...

Questions and Answers

by Trung Nguyen

You’re an H.H.P., N.C., and M.H. Can you tell us what those initials stand for, their descriptions, and how they play a role in treating alcoholism?

Actually, I’m a nutritional biochemist and researcher and yes I’m a licensed H.H.P., N.C., and M.H.

H.H.P.: Holistic Healthcare Practitioner

N.C.: Nutritional Consultant

M.H.: Master Herbalist

These disciplines that I’m formally educated and trained in focus on the functionality of cells and organs—how they support each other and how they become healthy or diseased. Since alcoholism at its root is a metabolic disorder created by nutritional deficiencies that have developed into tissue and organ damage and biochemical imbalance, a cure needs to focus on the tissues and re-establishing healthy biochemistry.

Nutritional biochemistry is a study of functional nutrition and how it can address the nutritional deficiencies of various diseases and conditions which ultimately heals the condition. Targeted Nutritional Therapy (TNT) leads in success rates as treatment for alcohol addiction. It is non-toxic and non-invasive and produces quality sobriety that conventional treatments do not produce. Conventional treatments can ultimately be the cause of high relapse rates. Also, I’d like to mention that only through Targeted Nutritional Therapy and healing the endocrine system can you actually achieve a cure. There will never be a cure in conventional treatments such as talk therapy, the use of drugs, or psychotherapy. You can’t talk yourself out of an addiction, you can’t use another drug on top of alcohol and all the damage alcohol has done from its toxicity.

You can’t use another toxic drug to fix what’s already been diseased from toxicity. And this is why the word cure seems so far fetched for some people, even the concept of a cure for alcoholism is farfetched for people to wrap their heads around because for years conventional treatments have been fooling people. Due to their extremely high failure rates, conventional treatments have been convincing people that there is no cure.

The media has been lying to people. Mainstream media actually is funded by the very corporations that profit from disease and actually sell the products that cause addictive biochemistry. So you’re not ever going to get the truth out of mainstream media regarding how to cure anything. What you’ll hear is a lot of propaganda about treatments because that is where the profit is—in treating in any kind of disease, not in curing them.

In your book, Alcoholism: The Cause and Cure. The Proven Orthomolecular Treatment, you’ve identified the root cause of alcoholism as biochemical in nature. Can you elaborate on what “biochemical” is for those who are not familiar with the term?

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical substances and vital processes that occur in living organisms. Now, it’s very important to understand the term “vital processes” because that is exactly what is usurped when alcohol toxicity causes the malnutrition that produces the biochemical imbalances that cause addiction.

Cells require a nutrient rich environment that’s being denied people today for a number of reasons that I can get into later. However, in the case of alcohol addiction micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients are severely depleted which causes the chemical imbalances, specifically in brain chemistry that develops into an addiction because the body can no longer produce the neurotransmitters and hormones required for healthy states of mind. Thus the person is encouraged to seek these neurochemicals from external sources such as alcohol and many, many other drugs and even pharmaceutical drugs. A person needs pharmaceutical drugs to treat alcohol addiction as much as they need alcohol, which is not at all. What they need are the nutrients and conditions for the cells to function in the ways they were meant to function so they can produce the neurotransmitters and hormones that the person is deficient in that is causing them to seek these neurotransmitters and hormones from external sources.

The bottom line is that alcohol addiction is a chemical imbalance produced by a damaged endocrine system. So the fix would be a biochemical solution that heals the endocrine system and therefore produces the neurochemicals that the brain requires to produce healthy states of mind, which cures the addiction.

You created the 101 Program, www.the101program.com , which is based on Orthomolecular Medicine. Orthomolecular Medicine was conceptualized by Linus Pauling, the American quantum chemist and biochemist. He is the only person in history who won two Nobel prizes that were not shared with another recipient. For those who are not familiar with Orthomolecular Medicine, can you tell us the premise behind Orthomolecular Medicine, and its role in alcoholism?

In the words of Linus Pauling himself, “Orthomolecular Medicine is one that aims to restore the optimum ecological environment for the body cells by correcting the imbalances or deficiencies on the molecular level based on individual biochemistry using natural substances such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, hormones, and essential fatty acids.”

Now, what this means in layman’s terms, which was also expressed by Linus Pauling himself is simply to use Ford parts to repair a Ford. Essentially the body isn’t functioning properly because its parts are broken or missing and it’s the job of a good Orthomolecular Practitioner to identify which parts are broken or missing and establish them, provide them by using Targeted Nutritional Therapy and dietary changes.

Due to the fact that all the epidemic diseases of today, including addiction, are caused by diets—the standard American diet, which is denatured, commercial, industrialized, processed and poisoned foods is causing widespread malnutrition.

Orthomolecular Medicine will be the medicine of the future. You simply cannot attempt to separate man from nature and attempt to do so is killing people by the thousands every day.

How and why did you become interested in Orthomolecular Medicine and the treatment of alcohol abuse?

There’s a professional and personal answer to that question and they both actually intertwine. While I was in college, I partied like the rest of them and I had many, many friends that I partied with, and as time went by many of them developed a problem with alcohol and became addicted and then started going to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, and I saw such a dramatic change in them and not necessarily good. They couldn’t hang out with people that they used to hang out with because their friends were drinking here and there. Just many, many things. This would be fine but they weren’t getting any better. They were white-knucklers craving alcohol. I saw them pounding down sugar-- they just dove into the sugar bowl and I saw their health progressively get worse. They were gaining more weight than normal.

As I was progressing through school and personally witnessing this, I started looking at this and became very curious as to how this happened to them—how did they go from recreational drinkers to being addicted to alcohol and what I did was I, as a matter of exercise, began researching how alcohol broke the body down and how the toxicity of alcohol, in metabolizing alcohol, damaged the body to try and understand the progression of alcohol addiction—what makes one go from a recreational drinker to a person addicted to alcohol. The more I researched, the more it became a passion because there were answers out there except nobody, except for pioneers such as Dr. Abram Hoffer and of course Joan Matthews-Larson, was addressing the damage that I was finding through their papers and the papers from the National Institute of Health and NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism).

The answers were out there. We knew what the damage was but except for these very few people no one was, especially mainstream medicine, including this knowledge and addressing the root cause of the problem in their treatments to actually produce cures for these people. I thought it was very personal because I wanted to help my friends first, then it became a career because when I began developing Orthomolecular treatments, actually helping people. The results I witnessed made my work gratifying that I continued helping people in this way, which ultimately defined my career.

It’s interesting to note that another prominent scientist, Everett Storey, also made the biochemical (nutritional deficiency) connection with health. Everett Storey, for those not familiar, is the inventor of the water-splitting technology that made the hydrogen bomb possible. Albert Einstein once called Everett Storey a “genius.” Mr. Storey also believed that health can be maintained and disease and sickness cured by delivering oxygen, enzymes, amino acids, and ionic minerals to the body at the molecular, or cellular, level. How long has the connection between biochemical and health been around for?

Our physician within has known about the connection when the first human cell developed. In the view of Orthomolecular Medicine all diseases are the product of some form of malnutrition and this has been known and respected by all healers of all traditions. It is only in the last 150 years that Western Medicine has been putting itself forcibly in the spotlight. The connection between biochemical and health has not only been forgotten but when brought up, dismissed as witchcraft or non-sense by allopathic [drug-based] practitioners. This fundamental disrespect for man’s connection to nature and our reliance on it for our very survival is what is getting us into a lot of trouble because it is this fundamental disrespect that is causing the environmental decay and destruction that is poisoning us and causing the diseases that we suffer.

Unethical growing practices such as GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), pesticides and fertilizers, that in no way resemble nature’s organisms, combined with the equally unethical food processing techniques that are robbing what little nutrition is left by the growing process while adding toxic chemicals to the food, exhausted by its resources and depleting its nutrition composition to the point where it can no longer detoxify quickly enough and repair itself before damaging disease sets in is a blatant crime against both nature and man.

Disease is the product of the human body, or any organism for that matter, detaching from the environment that sustains its survival. It is the detaching from the environment that the organism is depraved of the tools that it has used for millions of years to repair and replicate itself. You cannot control or mimic nature. It has survived for 3 million years and it has the intelligence to survive another 3 million if we leave it alone. It is the audacity of thinking that we can control, mimic, or do better than nature that we get ourselves in trouble. We suffer from our own audacity.

Ignorance is never more harmful than when we think we’re separate from our environment.

There have been numerous studies, past and present by very bright people, who have demonstrated the biochemical connection behind addictions. Why do you think that the public, for the most part, is not aware of this fact?

Food and pharmaceutical companies are two industries that deliver people to disease, and profit from its treatment. These industries own the mainstream media by their advertising dollars. In fact, if they [food and pharmaceutical industries] don’t outright own them [the media]. Pharmaceutical companies also own much of allopathic [drug-based] medicine, especially psychiatry. Psychiatry’s latest crime against humanity, taken from a long list which includes eugenics, torture, lobotomies, and electrical shock, is now chemical lobotomies through the use of psychotropic [mind-altering] drugs.

There’s no such thing as free press in the U.S. anymore. Who truly believes that a station is going to expose the truth with the volume of evidence stacked against the food and pharmaceutical industries and expose the fact that their products are causing disease and killing people. Take a count of the commercials you see during one sitting of your favorite T.V. show. Nearly all, if not all, of them will be selling denatured foods drenched in sugar, prescription and OTC [Over the Counter] drugs. Do you think that networks are going to air information that make these products look bad? Of course not! Not only would it make them look bad for peddling it but they would go out of business in a second because their advertisers would pull out.

Mainstream media today is nothing more than a propaganda vehicle for large corporations whose profits center around diseasing then drugging you. Even the news you watch is censored by them.

Bottom line: They [food and pharmaceutical industries] own the air waves and ink and paper of newspapers. Don’t ever expect to hear the truth from these venues. Mark Twain once said, “If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed and if you don’t, you’re uninformed.”

Well, thanks to the Internet, we can now find the truth and subscribe to the periodicals and news veins that carry the message of these brilliant people who are doing nothing more than reuniting us with the power of nature which embodies the blueprint of life and provides the physicians within the building blocks it needs to create and sustain life.

God created us and nature sustains us because God is in Nature.

For anyone who has not read your book, Alcoholism: The Cause and Cure. The Proven Orthomolecular Treatment, or is not familiar with your work, they would be introduced to new ideas and concepts, which are based on very sound scientific and medical evidence. If someone were coming from AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and were resistant to these ideas and concepts, what would you tell them?

Well, to instead of having an opinion based on either philosophical views or those learned from urban legends, try it for two months and experience it. Each and every person that has come from these views that ultimately work against them-- prevented them from experiencing the enhanced health and quality sobriety that Orthomolecular Medicine provides for alcohol addiction-- has joyously denounced their old views after trying the program. Many of my patients are those that have been in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous)for sometime and were still battling with the cravings, triggers, and suffering the symptoms of their damaged endocrine system, such as depression, anxiety, fatigue, emotional instability, heightened perception of stress, etc.

AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) is not a treatment and using it as a standalone treatment is one of the premiere causes of relapse. If you don’t heal the symptoms, you’re likely to begin drinking again in an attempt to self-medicate those symptoms. You cannot fight human nature. It is natural to seek relieve from pain. You’re going to fight the desire to drink until you cure the symptoms. Unfortunately, many people in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), dead set against drinking the symptoms away will begin anti-depressants or anxiety medication which of course comes with its own health risks and leads them away from the quality sobriety that is going to enable them to live the life that they were born capable of living.

Why Orthomolecular Medicine is such a threat to a dry drunk was always a mystery to me until I drew the biochemical road map of biochemical addiction and sugar addiction. Alcohol and sugar are interchangeable addictions. Sugar provides a milder infusion of the very same neurochemicals that these people once looked to alcohol for. This is why AA members actually, all former drinkers, are so reluctant to just stop their doughnut, Coke, and sugar drenched coffee dietary practices. Until they begin providing their bodies and minds with what is required to produce the feel good neurotransmitters that they’re deficient in they will suffer symptoms and cravings.

I would say please accept this truth because when you do you will embrace Nature’s treatment and heal. Like the saying goes: The Truth Shall Set You Free.

In your book, you mentioned Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). I found it enlightening that Bill Wilson was actually a strong advocate of Orthomolecular Medicine as treatment for alcoholism, but his views were not shared by the Alcoholics Anonymous International Board, which he helped create. Can you tell us what happened there?

This is one of my favorite stories. Bill Wilson was actually the first fan of Orthomolecular Medicine for the treatment of alcohol addiction. Bill Wilson worked with Dr. Abram Hoffer while Dr. Abram Hoffer was researching the effects of vitamin B3 (niacin) for the treatment of alcoholism. While working with Dr. Hoffer, Bill Wilson had a tremendously favorable response personally taking vitamin B3.

What Bill did was he went off and he did his own research. He collected 30 members of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and provided them with aggressive therapeutic dosages of niacin. Well, the results again were so favorable that Bill Wilson became extremely excited and passionate about getting the Orthomolecular Medicine treatment into the AA experience. During the trial, his fellow Alcoholic Anonymous members were reporting extremely favorable results taking vitamin B3—a reduction and sometimes complete elimination of symptoms such as depression, anxiety, nervousness, mental and physical fatigue-- all of the very common symptoms that go along with those who quit drinking.

Bill became more and more extremely passionate about getting the Orthomolecular Medicine treatment into the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) experience. So he went to the International Board of the physicians of AA and presented this evidence and by this time he’d also achieved a lot of collaboration with other highly esteemed physicians. Ultimately, the physicians of AA’s International Board, which he did appoint, shunned him, ridiculed him and even ostracized him. They asked him to discontinue using the AA letterhead in correspondence regarding this matter. They even said to him that he being a layperson had no business discussing this type of treatment or any kind of treatment for that matter with them; this coming from a group of physicians at this time really surprises me because I know for a fact that physicians, even in the most esteemed schools such as Stanford, receive about 4 hours of nutritional education. I know because I have an uncle who was a Stanford graduate of medical school. So, you know these people, these doctors, had no business discussing the matter with him is my viewpoint.

Yes, Bill’s passion toward the end of his life was to get Orthomolecular treatment into the Alcoholics Anonymous experience.

In light of this history, it really baffles me that AA dismisses this passion of their founder. He was visionary. He was a genius. Bill Wilson was a genius. He organized a bunch of people that before him could not be organized. Those quitting drinking or those with an alcohol problem before Bill’s influence were not excited about the idea of corrugating and dealing with this publicly in rooms with other alcoholics. So, I’m baffled how people can consider themselves friends with Bill if they don’t share his passion. I consider myself a friend with Bill. I would work with Bill today if he were alive. I wish he were because with all the evidence we have could use his influence to work it into the AA experience, save lives and help the people that need this help.

You’re not a big fan of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) because the failure rate according to AA itself is over 90%. What ideas, strategies, or methods of AA does not agree with your line of thinking?

Unfortunately, many. The fact is that the Big Book prescribes relapse and the environment that is provided at meetings both philosophical and physical and emotional also feed relapse.

For one, it encourages the use of what science knows is the number one cause of relapse and that is sugar and caffeine. The Big Book even suggests that you use sugar to quell alcohol cravings and this is crazy. Your alcohol cravings are not going to go away until you stop using sugar to quell them.

AA also preaches a gloom and doom dogma: one drink equals a drunk, and that you are powerless. Then the biggie which is probably responsible for the highest suicide rates of AA members is that you have disease for which there is no cure and you are sentenced to live with this disease for the rest of your life. That is really, really, bad to be telling people that are suffering the black void of this addiction, the depression, the desperation, the anxiety, the sense of failure, the being ostracized from your family, losing jobs. Going through all of this turmoil and then being told that you have a disease for which there is no cure and you’re going have to live with it for the rest of your life.

I’m telling you when these people are having a really bad day and you don’t give them hope and you tell that this is what their life is going to look like for the rest of their lives, no wonder they’re killing themselves. Who can sit there in that condition and really come up with a reason for living another day. I mean this sentencing that they give their members is extremely harmful and AA’s failure rate proves my position. I give evidence-based hope, don’t let mainstream lie to you and don’t let the failure of conventional treatment and AA fool you.

There is a cure. I want these people to know that. I want them to know that there is a cure. A cure being that you don’t crave alcohol or any substance anymore and you don’t suffer the symptoms that you are suffering anymore. That is the definition of a “cure.” And yes there is a cure. Thousands of people are experiencing this. All you have to do is abide the laws of health because they’re not negotiable and you will achieve a cure but you’re not going achieve it sitting in an AA meeting listening to this gloom and doom and suffering all these symptoms and sucking down a coffee. It’s not natural to be sucking down three cups of sugar-filled coffee at 9 o’clock at night. Alcoholics Anonymous attitudes and beliefs regarding alcohol addiction is only a report of their experience. But their experience is based on how they go about trying to heal.

Alcoholics Anonymous is proven by its failure statistics—it’s not just about quitting drinking and it’s not just about being sober. You can’t continue to damage the endocrine system with sugar, junk foods and caffeine and expect to meet with any success because you will be miserable until you buckle and relapse. It is also very true that when a approach like this dealing with a progressive disease because you progressively damage the organs that were malfunctioning that made alcohol so attractive in the first place.

I’m also very critical of AA because I have attempted to integrate the good parts of the support group, which there are many, with that of Orthomolecular treatment. But just like 50 years ago, Bill Wilson and the physicians of the AA International Board, I’m meeting with the same resistance. I have called, I have talked to the officials of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York and I get a canned response. They simply say that they don’t endorse any treatment whatsoever because they are a support group. In practice, that’s not true because I know for a fact that AA either condones or approves certain treatments and not others. They do not approve of Orthomolecular Medicine because it has taken away their secondary drugs of choice.

Orthomolecular treatment being taught at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings would take the meetings out of the gloom and doom aspect and get the dogma out of the way. Orthomolecular treatment would give people pragmatic, practical tools and education that will truly help them heal. And AA’s resistance to do this makes me extremely critical of them. They won’t integrate what science knows will help their members. This is an extremely bold statement to make but in not doing it I believe they are actually harming people and sometimes killing them.

Shouldn’t a support group be designed to help the people that are going there for support? Doesn’t support and help mean the same thing? Orthomolecular medicine is a scientific evidence based treatment that actually heals and cures the addiction. Now, why wouldn’t a support group want to bring that information in and share it with their members? And when are they going to get the fact that it is their resistance to do this is creating their failure rate, which by the way is over 90%.

Besides the biochemical root cause of alcoholism, how important do you feel that other, perhaps secondary causes such as cognitive deficits, social and environmental factors contribute to the problem?

Orthomolecular Medicine addresses everything that influences the cell so that includes everything in the cell’s environment. The 5 key conditions that influences the cell are:

It is very important to, on an individual basis to determine which of these may be causing addictive biochemistry by causing imbalances in the neuroendocrine system and then providing targeted individualized approach to relieving the cellular environment of what is stressing it. People are simply too stimulated today. Their Dyson environment are over-stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and this is causing a detrimental impact on the body’s ability to maintain homeostasis. When the body can’t achieve balance and comfort in its environment, it will seek its medicine externally. The body internally adapts naturally, which in the case of addictive biochemistry, produces healthy levels of neurochemicals for the brain to function well. This is a primal, intuitive mechanism and is built into our survival instinct.

Our poor outlook toxic emotions and heightened perception of stress due to being constantly over-stimulated will drain your resources and render you in a constant fight or flight syndrome. This will cause everything from cancer, indigestion, addiction to immune deficiencies. Once the chemical chaos that alcohol and drugs impose on the system is out of the picture and targeted nutritional therapy is adopted to support the organs that can benefit from the adjunct treatment. It is time to explore what is best for you. So, the full spectrum integrity healing approach would be to first establish a healthy biochemistry.

The body and mind simply cannot function void of the building blocks required of the cells to repair and replicate. And the body and mind certainly cannot function and benefit from many of the very valuable adjunct [natural, integrative] healing methods available such as acupuncture, meditation, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), Yoga, and even counseling and support groups. Once healthy biochemistry is established it would be wise to augment the healing intention by embracing a number of methods for stress reduction and those that promote and sustain healing. All these practices and many more have a very positive affects on the cells of the body. And therefore on your life. However, as I said first a healthy biochemistry and stable, clear and relaxed states of mind need to be achieved. It’s simply impossible for one even to meditate much less benefit from it when they’re so stimulated they can’t quiet their thoughts or relax.

In the patients you’ve treated, do you find that alcoholism is mostly inherited or acquired?

Let me clear something up first. There is no such thing as a gene that is responsible for alcoholism. Genes do not turn themselves on and off and they’re not self-emergent. So, there will never be a gene found to be responsible for alcoholism. However, people can be born with an inherent disposition for addictive biochemistry. Babies that are born to crack mothers come out of the womb addicted to crack, so this is an inherent condition because the mother was addicted, the baby is also going to be addicted. Those who are born to parents that had damaged endocrine system or preference for carbohydrates because of years and years and years of family history of ingesting industrial food products, then the child’s going to be born with a deficient endocrine system. That will indeed predispose them to addictive biochemistry.

To answer the question as to whether alcoholism is mostly inherited or acquired, it’s fairly down the middle actually. In some cases it’s harder to determine because children today are being raised on substances that people call food that don’t resemble food at all. It actually encourages addictive biochemistry. So it’s very difficult sometimes to determine if it was an inherent condition or not. However, the treatment is always the same. It’s just the length of treatment that is different. Remember though, the good news is that the body can entirely heal from an inherent condition that it was born with so long as the environment is corrected in a healing environment as opposed to the environment that damaged it. A healing environment can in fact rebuild a healthy neuroendocrine system and the person will no longer demonstrate addictive chemistry.

This is a quote from your book, “The idea of using a drug to treat chemical dependency is ludicrous and criminal, defeating all common sense.” You’re not a big fan of prescription pills. At what point in your personal life, education, or career did you adopt this stance?

I have both a personal and professional answer to this. My personal answer is that starting with mother who my I lost to prescription medications, particularly Valium. My mother saw a psychiatrist in the late 70s for stress and within a year she was a walking zombie. That was my first experience with witnessing as a child the effects that these drugs have on people and then of course friends. As these drugs especially in the late 80s when these drugs became more and more popular friends and family and so many people became walking zombies taking these things. I mean they truly produced chemical lobotomies.

I wasn’t impressed with prescription pills, and also being an Orthomolecular practitioner, always having a reverence for Nature and its supremely powerful ability to heal the human body. Of course using any kind of toxic drug is against my sensibilities. The body does not care, it doesn’t recognize if a drug came from person in a white coat, a person on the street or anywhere else. The body recognizes the toxic substance as a toxic substance and the person will suffer as the result of ingesting this toxic substance.

I have never saw anyone achieve any healing or cure for anything taking a psychotropic medication. Psychotropic drugs do not produce any healing--they subdue the person, they put them to sleep essentially, they lobotomize them, but they don’t cure them, they manage them. It’s impossible to have anxiety when you’re numb.

Psychotropic medication simply doesn’t cure what was in the person’s lifestyle that was creating the anxiety in their biochemistry or in their diet that is creating the anxiety. On the surface these prescription pills forgive the irresponsible and unhealthy lifestyle that was producing these symptoms. These symptoms are evident when the body is telling you, hey, I’m in trouble. Symptoms are your friends . Yes, they are a little uncomfortable but when you respond to them properly, they save your life. When you respond to symptoms properly and change the irresponsible, incorrect, unhealthy lifestyle that was producing these symptoms, the symptoms will go away.

However, if you take a toxic pill that only mask the symptoms then you’re still practicing a unhealthy lifestyle, you’re still breaking the body down and now you’re introducing a toxic substance that is going to cause further damage and more ill-health and more problems without fail.

There seems to be a pill for every addiction or minor problem these days. There’s a new pill called Varenicline, sold under the brand name Chantix, that’s supposed to be a cure for all addictions. What are your views on prescription pills and their role in combating alcoholism or addiction in general?

I think I’ve pretty much shared my views on that. Again, as with all pills, these things that they call side-effects are direct-effects. There’s nothing side about them. They’re direct effects. They are symptoms, and symptoms are signs that something is wrong and should be taken very seriously. Also taking pills, taking an outside source, an outside substance, totally is in line with addiction and addictive biochemistry. The idea that you can use something external other than what the cells need to repair themselves and create healthy biochemistry is not going to be the answer. This is looking external-- outside the natural order of things to heal and there’s simply no such thing. You cannot fight three million years of the cell’s survival and how it has survived. The notion that a toxic drug that a doctor gives you in a form of a pill is any different than what you can get over the counter at the store or on the street is entirely wrong. The body does not see a difference, only how toxic is it. In fact, the pills the doctors give away like candy are most of the time far more toxic than the ones people get off the street.

One of the blessings of alcohol addiction is that a doctor doesn’t prescribe it. People who have an alcohol addiction recognize, yes I have a problem with alcohol—this toxic substance called alcohol. However, if doctors prescribed it, they would never, or rarely, come to terms with the fact that this is a toxic drug that is harming them. Unfortunately, when people are given toxic drugs by doctors for some reason they think that M.D. (Medical Doctor) stands for Medical Divinity and they’re not going to suffer from the toxic nature of these drugs because they’re subscribed to them by their doctors. People think that prescription drugs actually possess some kind of cure when they don’t. Instead they cause more problems.

Chantix is known to cause a number of direct effects. I love the play of words the company [Pfizer] uses to sell this product: "It has a 4 times greater success rate than all medications for quitting smoking." Well, 4 times 0 is still 0.

What would you say are the major side effects of prescription medication that people should be concerned about?

I think I’ve made my position quit clear. The answer would be raising the pill to your mouth and swallowing it.

There are two Ps in pharmaceutical industry. “If it can’t be Patented or you can’t make a Profit from it, it’s not medicine.” What are your views on the pharmaceutical industry?

Just to add to what I’ve already shared on this subject. Any industry that spends millions and millions of dollars through organizations such as CODEX [The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme] to have the natural means, things that are actually helping people heal, such as vitamins, minerals, natural substances--any company that spends millions of dollars to have the right and access to these substances taken away from us has got to be evil and corrupt and it's exactly what the pharmaceutical industry is doing. The pharmaceutical industry is lobbying Congress and putting force through many, many avenues, such as the WHO [World Health Organization] and trade laws, etc. to have these substances taken away from us. They have been successful in many countries already. Their next frontier is the U.S.

Now, is the reason why they’re lobbying to have these natural substances taken away from us because they’re bad for us? Of course not. If they were concerned about our health they wouldn’t be dosing us with chemical lobotomies, agents that produce chemical lobotomies and many, many, many other diseases. No, it’s because these natural cures are actually working and they are a huge threat to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. This should serve as some credibility for Orthomolecular Medicine because they would care less about Orthomolecular Medicine if it did not pose a threat. They [pharmaceutical industry] wouldn’t be spending millions of dollars trying to have these substances taken away from us if Orthomolecular Medicine didn’t work.

Do you think that there is a coordinated effort by the pharmaceutical industry to dismiss natural medicine as a cure for mental and physical health?

Absolutely. When they’re not focused on taking the right to natural healing away from us, they’re absolutely focused on discrediting practitioners and substances that do promote natural healing. Since the pharmaceutical industry own the airwaves and mainstream media, they have every opportunity and have executed on every opportunity to discredit natural healing. This is again one of the reasons why people have been so denatured in their views because they’ve lived a lifetime of listening to the pharmaceutical industry's propaganda.

What people need to do is listen to their hearts and common sense. Because if you take a look at our recent history, just in the last 100 years since industrialized foods and pharmaceuticals came into the common experience we have been suffering every year in alarming numbers. Growing exponentially are epidemic diseases that were rarely heard of 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. Now if you look at the span of time, just 100 years, what is different? What is going on? The answer to that is industrialized, denatured, commercial, processed foods on one hand and pharmaceutical toxic drugs on the other.

One label of alcoholism is that it’s a disease. Scurvy was once a serious disease. It was found that scurvy was caused by the insufficient intake of vitamin C. So, the disease scurvy was caused by a nutritional deficit and the cure was to eat more fruits and vegetables such as lemons, grapefruits, oranges, broccoli, cabbage, and other fruits. Logic would dictate that if one disease can be cured by food or food supplements, then the same idea should work for another disease. Is this a logical assumption or a simplistic one?

It’s absolutely not a simplistic assumption. In fact it’s a very, very good point. Alcoholism, one, isn’t a disease. It can cause many diseases. It’s not a disease. Alcoholism is a metabolic disorder that is created by extreme nutritional deficiencies that have damaged the neuroendocrine system. And the 101 Program which prescribes Targeted Nutritional Therapy and Condictive Diet does exactly for alcoholism what vitamins C does for Scurvy.

This is a quote from your book, “…Unhealthy diets can lead directly to addiction and disease…They must completely avoid the commonplace food items distributed by the irresponsible food distribution system that actually encourage addictive bio-chemistry; they must avoid what is slowly killing people in the process, landing them in doctor’s offices for arthritis (and many other degenerative diseases), depression, cancer, bipolar disorder, obesity, anxiety, ADD…” This would suggest that some of the unhealthy foods people are eating are causing the aforementioned illnesses?

Absolutely! In the case of addictive chemistry, sugar empties the tank. Sugar on one end over accentuates the inhibitory providing , in the beginning, an infusion of serotonin, GABA, and endorphins. However, on the flip side empties the tank for these neurotransmitters by exhausting all the nutritional precursors to produce them naturally. High sugar diets cause insulin resistance and hypoglycemia which causes extreme mental distresses which produces symptoms such as depression, anxiety, panic attacks, even the inability to relax. These symptoms exist in people who are attracted to alcohol and they’ll use alcohol to self-medicate, which is the key to addictive biochemistry. Again, alcohol and sugar provide the elixir of neurochemicals that the person has been made deficient in because of the empty carb diets. Much of what is on the self-today is just short of cardboard that’s been sprayed with RAID. It’s got the nutritional value of cardboard with all the pesticides and addictive substances and neurotoxins and other toxins that are put in the food, creating a product, not a food, that is empty in nutrients and full of poison. These poisons and malnutrition combined do cause disease.

Again, you cannot separate man from nature and that is what is happening to our food supply, to our environment, to our lifestyles, and it’s producing diseases in epidemic numbers.

Food can affect how we feel. If a person wanted to feel happy, what are some foods they should be eating?

First, there are a couple of creeds that you want to go by. One, you want to reintroduce whole foods. Foods the way nature made them. You want to eliminate the middle man and you want to make a discernment between what a food handler and a food processor is. A farmer that brings food to the farmer’s market and sells it to you the way nature made it is a food handler and a food processor is those such as General Mills and Kraft are the ones that are denaturing the product, processing food to the point where there’s no nutritional value and adding addictives and toxic agents to it. Those are food processors. These I call the middle man. They’re the ones profiting from diseasing you. You want to eliminate them from your kitchen and your diet completely.

Now the food handlers, the ones I’ve identified, are the ethical ones. You want to purchase organic food and don’t be fooled with the word “organic” either. Many irresponsible, unethical food processors that are recognizing that people want to be healthy and choose organic foods and are even willing to pay higher prices are taking a lot of shortcuts and are legally calling them organic because the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] has very loose definitions for organic now. But there are organic labels that are very pure and you want to find out which ones those are in your area and purchase from those farmers. So, that’s the umbrella view that you need to take when shopping and approaching a healthy diet.

Foods that you should be eating if you want to feel good-- today there is an epidemic, low serotonin condition in many people because of the over-stimuli of today’s life. The processed foods that they’ve been eating for probably a lifetime includes sugars, cokes, coffees, all of which drains serotonin. So, you want to eat serotonin rich foods like lean, organic pasture raised turkey, chicken, and good organic cheeses. That’s a start. You don’t have to make a science out of it. Once you enter the kingdom of raw wholesome, good for you foods, the way nature made them, unadulterated by the profit machine, by the middle man, you’re in pretty safe territory. All you have to do is have a balanced diet that includes protein, good fats, and complex carbohydrates and you’ll be fine. Your body will heal and your mind will heal and you will absolutely be enjoying life again.

I want to note that in the 101 Program I stress the Condictive Diet—the diet that opposes addictive biochemistry. A Condictive Diet is nothing more than a paleolithic, insulin sparing diet that is essentially the way humans have eaten for 67,000 years and is the most friendly to the body providing it only what it only requires to replicate growth and repair itself. If people eat the way they were meant to, meaning the way they have been eating for 67,000 years and utilized the intelligence of every cell in their body then they wouldn’t have to diet it off. They could throw every single dieting book out of their house, off their bookshelves because when you eat the way that you were meant to eat you don’t have to diet.

This is a quote form your book, “Addictive chemistry…this biological tendency is caused by a naturally deficient neuroendocrine system.” What is the neuroendocrine system for those not familiar with it?

The neuroendocrine is the network of endocrine organs such as the pituitary pancreas, adrenals, thyroid and the nervous system. A deficient neuroendocrine system is one that has been made exhausted by trying to keep with the up demands of a dietary otherwise toxic environment. When this system can longer meet the needs of healthily adapting to its environment it will produce symptoms. The neuroendocrine system is made deficient by impossible demands such as psychological environmental stresses on one end and malnutrition on the other which depletes the resources it requires to even try to meet with today’s assault against our health. The key organs to familiarize yourself when attempting to understand the genesis of addiction are found in the HPA Axis (Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenals). These are the organs that are directly responsible for adaptation. In fact, the word addiction should be replaced with maladaptation [Faulty or inadequate adaptation].

This is a quote from your book, “When our internal environment is healthy, the body naturally provides healthy neurotransmitters and the hormone levels as needed to meet the demands of everyday life…” How do we get our neurotransmitters and hormones to be healthy?

Give the physician within what it has used for 3 million years to maintain life and survive and then get out of its way. We don’t need to know what to do really, thank goodness. We only need to make the right choices. We don’t need to think about how a wound on our skin heals. We don’t need to sit down and meditate and direct all the bio-energetics that it needs to achieve that process. It does it naturally if the physician within has all the tools it needs to procreate blood to rebuild skin tissues and healthy states of mind. In physical health, if you give the physician within what it requires to produce these two states then you’re going to experience health. When I say get out of its way, that means taking the toxins and the poisons out of our diet and out of our environment. Then of course introducing the right foods and the right environment that heals us.

This is a quote from your book, “Sugar could very well be the parent of all addictions…Mental and physical diseases are becoming epidemic due to “dead food” (sugars, addictives, processing, junk food; empty poisonous calories…” Much has been written about how unhealthy refined sugar is. What are the chemical properties of sugar that makes it the possible parent of all addictions?

Sugar is a very potent drug with zero nutritional value and in fact it actually robs the body of macro and micro nutrients in the process of metabolizing it. Sugar causes extreme fluctuations in blood sugar which causes many, many, many mental distresses and symptoms. Sugar causes insulin resistance which also causes the plethora of symptoms as well as hypoglycemia, sugar creates cravings for simple carbs [carbohydrates] and other potent simple carbs such as alcohol. It’s just by far the most addictive substance. By the way these substances [sugars] are what most people are addicted to.

People’s addictive biochemistry is epidemic today. People that I know are addicted in some way to something, be it sugar, be it coffee, food in the area of refined carbs or pharmaceutical drugs--sugar seems to parent all of these. As time goes on and more and more children are born and raised on denatured food products, void of nutrition, then they go to school and they can’t sit down, then they’re given pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is being compounded. It seems to me that sugar is the first problem. Sugar is the gateway drug, if you will, that opens the door to all these symptoms and other conditions for which people will go to doctors for pharmaceuticals for or to their drug dealers for illegal drugs for.

You’re a strong advocate of education in overcoming alcoholism. At the moment, most people think of alcoholism as a disease for which there is no known cure and they’re powerless over it. What more can be done to change how people think about alcoholism? If more education, through which channels?

We’re doing it here in this interview. But the first thing that we need to do is educate our children. In the home we need to feed them properly and we need to make sure they’re being fed properly in school; not that we need to prepare their meals for them. We need to as a family sit down in the morning and sit down in the evening with a full wholesome meal and some wholesome interaction. Education is the hardest to get out there because the systems that have created the environment that we live in now, the ignorant environment that we live in now is corrupt and they know what the truth is and they don’t want the truth out there . They [food and pharmaceutical industries] want to continue making their profits, so they’re going make it as difficult as possible to get the right education. Right now the institution is what is corrupt and that needs to be changed because it’s being run by companies and no longer the government, but by the companies that are profiting from diseases and drugs.

The channels are drug courts where people get in trouble and end up in court and get the right treatment and the right education. In traffic school where they can get the right treatment and education when they’ve been arrested for DUIs. Proactively it’s our children. We should get education into the schools that show these substances such as sugar for the drugs that they are in these things what people call food. For the drugs that they are, they’re not food and children need to be taught how to qualify, everyone needs to be taught how to qualify what food is. Doughnuts are not food, cupcakes are not food, food should be qualified by its nutritional value for the body. That’s the beginning.

Without going into specific details (it can’t be done in a single page anyway), what is the premise of The 101 Program?

The 101 Program integrates nutritional bio-repair and mind-body energy healing to correct addictive biochemistry at the cellular level and deliver you to your natural, healthy, non-addictive state, free from not only addiction but from the symptoms that brought you to it. As I mentioned, there are 5 primary influences that encourage either the health or disease of our cells. They are: nutrition, emotions (heart), thought (mind), internal and environmental toxicity (you can’t separate them), and EMF (Electro Magnetic Frequencies).

The 101 Program addresses all of these with the scientifically research and practiced holistic protocol . The 101 Program is founded on the view that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, and vice versa. When your molecular biochemistry is in chaos, so is your life. Using the principles and practices of Orthomolecular Medicine, this program educates you in the biology of your challenge, arming you with all the instructions and information you need to free yourself from addiction once and all. Through balance and harmony with the Earth’s pharmacy you find the path back to your original self in the state of enhanced health.

The 101 Program is named for getting back to basics. Getting back to our original temples and self. Removing the adulterations of nature from our diet and environment and creating and living in harmony once again with Nature. The 101 Program focuses on providing the body and mind with the environment and nutritional precursors it requires to naturally self-medicate you. The physician within can produce extremely potent euphoric chemicals that provide more joy and euphoria than any drug and it does it naturally.

When we return to our natural high, no other drug or substance is attractive because we simply don’t need it.